Debbie Harry: “I'm not going to deny that getting older is very difficult. You have to be very strong. "It's not something for cowards."

At 78 years old, Debbie Harry, the legendary vocalist of Blondie, the unmistakable heart-shaped mouth immortalized by Warhol, the undisputed red muse of David Cronenberg, has every reason to be tired.

Since she moved from her adoptive parents' home in New Jersey to find a life in New York in the late sixties, when she was just in her twenties, she has not stopped living extraordinary adventures.

And she attributes everything in her memoirs, De cara (Libros Cúpula, 2020), a passionate story in which there is sex, drugs and rock and roll, but also a lot of poetry, sensitivity, suffering and gender violence, to her innate curiosity. .

Exactly the same one that brought her at the end of last year to spend a few dizzying days in Madrid.

“There are people who are enormously happy staying at home, but I have always liked to see the world and live experiences in different places.

That's why traveling was always one of my big dreams,” explains Harry on the other side of the screen, sitting in the living room of her New York home.

He is about to return to Spain, a country where, according to his own explanation, he feels like a fish in water because the nighttime hours are perfect for someone whose favorite area is the night: “The first time I was there they took me to dinner at twelve at night, I loved it,” he explains with a dry kindness that can be intimidating.

He doesn't remember, of course, where he went.

Although Harry explains that in reality the real culprit for accepting the invitation to the Rizoma Fest is Isabel Coixet, who recovered it for the big screen in My life without me and whom he considers a great friend: “She is a true pioneer who has opened I walk to other women and is part of the world of cinema, which is the artistic expression that interests me the most right now,” she says without hiding a certain tiredness.

“I don't know how curiosity is cultivated.

I guess reading doesn't hurt and neither does having a certain education.

"I wouldn't say that I am a person especially obsessed with following trends, in fact I like to look at the networks and the Internet, I don't turn my back on that, but sometimes I go on digital binges that I need to get out of my sight," He confesses with a sense of humor so sparse that it is difficult to perceive him as such.

“But of course I try to see what the girls are doing right now, I check out their TikToks and obviously I love meeting new artists.

We are incredibly privileged to have access to all that amount of knowledge, and I often think of Doctor Spock from Star Trek, who had something very similar to the Internet long before we could even imagine it: if they needed all the information that was available about a planet they could get it and now we have that… we have that!”

Debbie Harry before the conference she gave in the context of the Rizoma Festival last November.

With such clear generational references, the surprise is capital when, asked about a possible heir to her punk spirit, she mentions Doja Cat. “I haven't gotten to know her personally, but I'm fascinated by what she does,” she says of this controversial rapper who is Also, a fashion icon.

“It is true that they are much more aware of their own image than we were in my generation and that is why perhaps they believe from the outside in, in a process different from ours, which is very similar to that of actors.”

Harry knows very well the universe of magazines and the servitudes of the image.

After all, his face is one of the most photographed in the world and one of the most popular of the 20th century, and one of his best friends in the fashion universe was Vivienne Westwood.

“I am not going to deny that growing old is very difficult.

You have to be very strong.

It's not something for the faint of heart.

It is not.

Especially if your physique and its evolution have been closely monitored, as is my case,” he says.

Harry, who speaks in his memoirs about sexual violence with absolute candor and with a refreshing feminist perspective, admits that he admires the new generations who have been able to bell the cat and also finds the movements related to body diversity very interesting: “It is very important that other canons be accepted and, above all, that they talk about it.”

She herself recognizes that from her position as a rock star, who in her time for a woman almost inevitably carried the label of sex bomb, it was not the public who made the most shocking comment that she remembers about her physique, but rather her own mother: “She was a very intelligent and funny woman, and she had a slightly twisted sense of humor.

One day she told me: “You have a high fashion face and a low fashion body.”

And after telling her this she bursts out laughing without a hint of resentment: you can also see it in her memoirs.

There is none for the woman who said this phrase to her, Catherine Harry, her adoptive mother, the one who raised her;

nor for her biological mother, a pianist whom he managed to find in the eighties and whom he refused to reestablish a relationship with.

Harry is still a curious woman who loves to travel and meet people: “I like to be playful, laugh and make slightly crude jokes and I tend to hang out with disrespectful, funny and intelligent people.

Maybe one thing that no longer attracts me like it did when I was young is ambition.

It can turn you into a demon.”